The Views of the Theosophists
More than once the editor of The Spiritualist has invited us Theosophists to enter its hospitable columns, and array the facts and arguments upon which we rely for the support of our opinions. This truly liberal spirit merits great commendation, and we will avail ourselves of the opportunity. Hitherto we have said little, for silence seemed the better course until the clamour of our detractors had measurably subsided. We have been honoured, in this country, with a degree of notoriety quite beyond our humble desires. By the united efforts of the press, the pulpit, and the rostrum, our name and supposed views have been made known to more people than those of any other society within my recollection. Strangely enough, the Spiritualists, who should have seen in us their natural allies against the common enemy, have regarded us as foes, and even charged us with the design of attempting to split the great body of believers into warring halves, in the interest of Catholicism. Let me, as briefly as possible, set forth the claims of Theosophists:—
1. We accept the doctrine of the immortality of the human spirit, and the fact of an intercourse between this world and the next.
2. We believe in the reality of medial phenomena, objective and subjective.
3. That mediumship may either be congenitally active or latent; in the latter case it may be developed into activity by effort under favouring conditions.
So far, you see, we are in perfect accord with Spiritualists. But we do not consider it beneficial to the individual or to society to indiscriminately encourage mediumship; for as now practised it subjects the sensitive to enormous perils, physical, psychological, and moral, and too often begets in the investigator a blind credulity, which speedily lapses into bigotry and dogmatism. Needless for me to cite manifold examples, when the personal experience of every veteran Spiritualist with physical mediums of both sexes, and the tone which has pervaded the speeches and writings of many public champions of the cause, these past thirty years, need only be appealed to.
Physical mediums should, in our judgment, be divided into two classes—those who are moved by the spirits of the departed, and those whose occult phenomena are attributable to the agency of their own doubles in concert with other potencies. We think that the neglect to so discriminate has caused infinite pain to honest mediums, scandal to a great movement, and disappointment to sincere investigators.
To properly understand our attitude towards Spiritualists, you should first know how we regard Man and Nature. To us, Man is a trinity, not a duality; in short, we accept the philosophy, which is the fundamental doctrine of all Oriental systems, and equally the basis of the Greek, Roman, and other derivatives. Inside the physical body and permeating it is an astral body, or soul, and these two are overshadowed (illuminated and spiritualised) by a third—the divine, immortal spirit, the νους, the ruach. At birth the babe is but a duality, and becomes a trinity only when reason begins to manifest itself—usually at the age of seven years, but sometimes earlier. And so, too, Nature has its physical side, its vitalising astral soul, and, sublimest of all, its eternally-existing, divine spirit.
We believe that the man of flesh dies, decays, and goes to the crucible of evolution, to be worked over and over again; that the astral man (or double, or soul), freed from physical imprisonment, is followed by the consequences of his earthly deeds, thoughts, and desires. He either becomes purged of the last traces of earthly grossness, and finally, after an incalculable lapse of time, is joined to his divine spirit, and lives forever as an entity, or, having been completely debased on earth, he sinks deeper and deeper into matter, and is annihilated. Usually the separation of soul and spirit occurs before the bodily death: this is the rule, but still there are exceptions. The soul, you perceive, we regard as matter, though exceedingly sublimated, and as completely subject to the laws of matter as the physical body itself.
The attractions of spirit are toward spirit, hence antagonistic to those of matter, and thus is the equilibrium of all things maintained. The man of pure life and spirituality of aspiration, one would logically say, would be drawn towards a more spiritual realm than this earth of ours, and repelled by its influence. Vice versa, he whose life has been a revel, a debauch, a scramble of sordid ambitions, a field for the exercise of cruelty and injustice, has no post-mortem attractions except to the earth, and would not, if he could (which he cannot) leave it. From a being thus brutalised, the divine, immortal spirit has shrunk in horror, and death finds the man but a duality, of which one part goes into the ground to rot, the other wanders in and about the habitations of men, obsessing sensitives, to glut vicariously its depraved appetites, until its life is burnt out by their very intensity, and dissolution comes to crown the direful career. These earth- bound souls, these that the Romans called the larvæ, are the “Elementaries” of the Theosophical Society, of which so much has been said with so little understanding. They are called elementaries, because, being naught but matter drawn from the elements, they ultimately return to those sources.
The “Elementals” are quite another thing. What, in common parlance, are termed u the forces of nature,” Oriental philosophy designates as beings to which we, in common with the masters whom we have studied, have applied the name “elemental” spirits. As intelligent Spiritualists know, the Eastern philosophies teach the doctrine of an evolution far more complete than that of our contemporary science. It has no “hiatus,” no “impassable chasm,” no “missing link.” The spiritual, equally with the physical side of the cosmos, has shaped itself in obedience to this primal impulse. In the effort to produce the master-piece, the Inner Man, lower astral forms have been evolved, as, in physical nature, from the mollusc up to the lecturer on protoplasm (chef d’æuvre of the visible universe), the chain of being has a million links. In the line of astral evolutions, the elementals have their place, and, as the apex commands all the lower parts of the pyramid, so man, by virtue of his position, has natural dominion over all beneath himself. But as mediumship, clairvoyance, and other qualities, have most commonly to be brought out and trained, so this power to rule subordinate beings has in most cases to be gained by man through initiation. He must first learn to subdue his physical self, and then other victories will be comparatively easy. The perfect initiate has absolute dominion over those errant, unthinking, soulless forces of nature, and with their help can do what common men call miracle. Of themselves they have no more desire to harm than to help us, and are no more responsible for their actions than the wind that blows, the fire that burns, the flood that devas- tales. They are the force of the wind, the fire, the flood. They are the creatures of immutable law, and man, in employing them, but uses them in obedience to the same; aiding nature, as Mme. Blavatsky says in her book, but never impeding it. We Theosophists totally deny the possibility of miracle.
Jesus pertinently said that an evil tree cannot bring forth good fruit. We apply this rule to immoral and intemperate mediums, promiscuous circles, dark seances, and physical <... continues on page 4-102 >
Editor's notes
- ↑ The Views of the Theosophists by Olcott H.S., London Spiritualist, No. 276, December 7, 1877, pp. 265-7
London Spiritualist, No. 276, December 7, 1877, pp. 265-7